July 17, 2018 4:15pm EDTJuly 17, 2018 4:13pm EDTNBA, NCAA Division I, KentuckyJohn Calipari has thought a lot about what the NBA's impending rule changes will mean for basketball's youngest players — and how he can best help them.(Getty Images)

At some time in the near future, the man who has worked with more “one-and-done” players than anyone in college coaching will have to conceive a new strategy for how to recruit in an age-limitless era.

Kentucky coach John Calipari will get to that. For now, though, he's concerned with how the NBA’s impending move to allow recent high school graduates into its draft will affect those young men.

Calipari told Sporting News he wants the NBA Players Association to consider running a scouting combine for elite high school juniors who might be considering whether to advance directly into the draft following graduation. The NBPA already conducts its “Top 100 Camp” each June; Calipari believes refashioning that into a combine-style event, with players and their families presented instruction on how to manage such a move, would be a natural transition.

He pointed to the success of the NBA combine event at identifying draft prospects — “Not one player who didn’t get invited to the combine got drafted” — as evidence a similar event for elite high school players could be helpful.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver said last week in response to the Rice Commission criticism of one-and-done players in college that the league is “ready to make that change.”

Calipari doesn’t know yet what form all of this will take, but he would like the NBA — if it moves toward encouraging players to enter the developmental G League out of high school instead of playing in college — to pay a reasonable signing bonus and to pledge to cover athletes’ college expenses should they decide to pursue a degree upon the completion of their playing careers.

“Then I would have no issues,” Calipari said. “Kentucky is going to be fine. The next coach at Kentucky is going to be fine. He’ll probably win an NCAA championship; that’s the history of this place. Are we doing right by kids?”

Kentucky has reached four Final Fours, won 28 NCAA Tournament games and won the 2012 NCAA Tournament championship, all successes achieved with key players who spent a single year on campus. UK hasn’t been back to the Final Four, though, since 2015. “It’s hard what we’re doing every year,” he said. “It’s difficult to do it that way.”

If that approach is to be unavailable in the future, though, he wants to be sure the NBA handles it so that young players will prosper. He worries about “unintended consequences” of the change.

“If kids are going out of high school, I’m fine,” he said. “How are we doing it? I haven’t heard a good plan.”

Calipari sees the circumstances of the ongoing FBI investigation into basketball, which resulted in charges against four NCAA assistant coaches, multiple shoe company executives and others involved in player representation, as “an opportunity to make the game better. Don’t screw it up.”

Calipari hopes that those in charge of making and adopting new policies will “come up with something that deals with how are we going to get information to the kids, and how are we going to deal with the players getting agents?”

The embarrassment of the coaching arrests led NCAA president Mark Emmert to put former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in charge of a commission to recommend improvements in the game. That panel cited (without supporting evidence) the pernicious influence of “one-and-done” on the college game. It recommended players be given access to agents while high school prospects, and that summer recruiting be dramatically curtailed or altered.

There also may be changes to the recruiting model, with one proposal being the introduction of NCAA-run regional camps — Calipari worried that these will be a “mishmash of kids" — that will entirely replace or cut into evaluations that lately had been done for players with established and familiar summer teams.

These recommendations, likely to be adopted as policy in some form next month, will create many questions for college coaches as they approach recruiting for the 2020 class and beyond.

Do coaches ignore the very top players, figuring they'll enter the draft? How many of those who do choose college might be “one-and-done” anyway? What’s the ideal recruiting model for top programs in the future?

“I haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about that,” Calipari told SN. “What is next? How can I be first at it? I don’t know what that is.

“I’m thinking about what I can do for the kids. It’s not about me, not about the program, not about the legacy. It’s about the kids, and let them be about the legacy and the program, help them understand why it matters.”

Calipari hasn't dealt with players’ agents while coaching roughly two dozen future NBA players at Kentucky. But he expects that if high school players are allowed to be represented by agents in the future, “I probably have to have a relationship with them.”

The condemnation of one-and-done players did not go unnoticed by Calipari. He cited the academic commitment of such former Wildcats as Brandon Knight and John Wall — and the graduation in three years by elite prospects Alex Poythress and Patrick Patterson — as evidence that top players belong on college campuses.

Some may choose not to, though. Asked if it will be harder to build a recruiting plan with “preps-to-pros” becoming the new norm for top prospects, Calipari answered, “Heck, yeah.” While at Memphis, Calipari had commitments from future NBA players Amare Stoudemire and Kendrick Perkins. Neither played in college.

“I didn't hold a grudge. I didn't have any hard feelings,” Calipari said. “We did well. We did OK. If they had come, it would have been a lot faster and quicker.”